PC Duke to Brass ratio needs to be seriously nerfed

Yeah but the smelting of dukes is more or less "unlimited", I think that's the issue, NOT the actual ratio.

That said, I still do not think that the smelting ratio should be changed.

As we can see above it is on a par with the cost of buying bullet casings directly, with the added hidden cost of smelt time and forging time (both of which are NOT negligible). There is also the opportunity costs of the player not having whatever item(s) or resources he could have otherwise purchased with those smelted dukes, and also not having the other resources or forged items that he could have made if he hadn't been smelting and forging the dukes to casings.

I would therefore argue that the ratio of dukes to brass is just fine, giving these hidden costs and opportunity costs that go with it; and that any Brass product other than Bullet Casing should be removed from all trader inventories.

 
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No doubt, if I'm halfway to being a millionaire without doing Trader quests, I can only imagine how easily Dukes would be gained if I did do them.
Ironically, I've got really no need for brass any more. I've got so much ammo for my turrets stashed away (and the blade traps are the primary BM horde killers in my base), and I'm already finding so much ammo that my Rifle has 2,000 7.62mm rounds in storage chests over and above what I'm carrying, that I really don't much need it for anything any more.

That said, I'm deep into late game and well past the point of any practical progression in my current game.

Edit: The other issue this raises, is that I'm playing a 4k map, have looted only 2 of the 7 or 8 towns that are on it, and I'm well past "done" for this game. At least for SP, even an 8k map would be massive overkill for me on default loot settings anyway.
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Sounds like your ready for the next difficulty setting. 😎 Maybe lowered loot abundance or more max alive horde night zeds if your not already set it to max.

 
Yeah but the smelting of dukes is more or less "unlimited", I think that's the issue, NOT the actual ratio.
That said, I still do not think that the smelting ratio should be changed.

As we can see above it is on a par with the cost of buying bullet casings directly, with the added hidden cost of smelt time and forging time (both of which are NOT negligible). There is also the opportunity costs of the player not having whatever item(s) or resources he could have otherwise purchased with those smelted dukes, and also not having the other resources or forged items that he could have made if he hadn't been smelting and forging the dukes to casings.

I would therefore argue that the ratio of dukes to brass is just fine, giving these hidden costs and opportunity costs that go with it; and that any Brass product other than Bullet Casing should be removed from all trader inventories.
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The ratio of melting should be 4-10 coins into 1 casing IMO

 
I think the biggest issue brought up here is that dukes are more valuable to scrap than to use to buy brass items. I haven't independently verified this, but if true, then surely we can all agree that shouldn't be the case, because it makes brass items for sale pointless. This isn't a play style thing, this is just basic game design: there shouldn't be things in the game that have no use case. Everything else about how long quests take and different people's rates of brass consumption is secondary to this more basic imbalance.
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Yep definitely this. Its one of the biggest indicators something isn't balanced.

It takes you 2 real time hours to clear a t5 clear quest with 3-4 people? how? I do it in 30 mins solo usually, 50 min max. Less if I don't waste time wrenching everything that I can. I use melee mostly a sledgehammer, and a unperked pistol usually as my poi raiding gun as I tend to have so much pistol ammo from loot I got nothing else to use it for. I play on warrior difficulty, as its a nice blend of risk+zombies not being bullet sponges. I also do not turret cheese, I only use junk turrets on horde night thats it, otherwise I feel they are pretty op and game breaking for how good they are even as a non-int build. If I was a Int build though i'd use the turrets a ton, as i'd be speced in them most likely. So far all of my games have been 0 int games. I get adv engineering lv 1, and when I find the nerd glasses, that sets my intel to 2, I get grease monkey 1, for a early game vehicle and ability to make wheels, since its rng if I find any vehicle schematic by then.
My current game is intersting, I think loot abundance is bugged, as when its set to anything below 100% (I have it at 75%) a ton of diff loot containers seem to bug out and are empty 95% of the time, Small ammo piles to name one thats almost always empty, I think out of 40 I looted only 2 actually had ammo in them, and thats with it set to 75%. At 100% Loot, those small ammo piles ALWAYS have stuff in them. So the fact 25% lower is making almost all of them empty seems like a bit of a bug to me. Its like instead of lowering how much they give by 25%, its taking the fact they give 1 item and making it always give 0/be empty. I am going to have to actually make ammo this game I think as I am deff not finding enough by looting for horde nights.
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I had said at most. Usually when we clear a T5 we loot it, take all the concrete and cobblestone, break down a lot of the stuff and really strip it down so when it resets we get all that loot again. Got 2 wrenchers who go to town on it, while the rest of us gather the other mats. Higashi is my least favorite T5.

If we just rush and clear its far faster. We also have the game modded for more zombie spawns so we tend to try to be a little more methodical.

That is part of the issue though the reward vs the time is just so good

 
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Yeah but the smelting of dukes is more or less "unlimited", I think that's the issue, NOT the actual ratio.
That said, I still do not think that the smelting ratio should be changed.

As we can see above it is on a par with the cost of buying bullet casings directly, with the added hidden cost of smelt time and forging time (both of which are NOT negligible). There is also the opportunity costs of the player not having whatever item(s) or resources he could have otherwise purchased with those smelted dukes, and also not having the other resources or forged items that he could have made if he hadn't been smelting and forging the dukes to casings.

I would therefore argue that the ratio of dukes to brass is just fine, giving these hidden costs and opportunity costs that go with it; and that any Brass product other than Bullet Casing should be removed from all trader inventories.
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Except your neglecting to take into the time required to gather the brass items. It takes a LONG time to gather brass from a POI for a small amount compared to the quest option. Even with those buildings with all the radiators you have to go room by room and clear it, gather all the brass by breaking the radiators. Limited to carrying it back in stacks of 5, and it doesn't respawn.

Versus doing a quest getting far more brass, and having a POI respawned so it has more loot available again, as well as getting the xp reward, and the reward for the quest at the end.

I mean the opportunity cost of having to smelt it is basically 0, just make another forge if you have a bottleneck, and even if you went out and harvested brass you'd still have to smelt and forge that into casings.

 
Isn't that 4 tokens per brass (not that it's any better that way)? 10 brass for 40 dukes?
With the faucets in game, I think you're also better off Selling one instead of smelting it. That could make some sense since they're quite complex items, but of course materials-wise, not exactly sane .. those I can live with though, I just treat it as a deco, until they come up with an actual use for them :)
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Opps lol. Yeah it was very late at night when I did it. Yeah it's just none of these items make any sense when comparing numbers. You're better off selling these to the trader then smelting the brass (or just smelting them), and if you purchase any brass item from a trader you're getting ripped off. I dig the ability to smelt brass, that's not the issue, just it's stupid to buy brass from a trader now, in any form or fashion.

 
Skimmed the thread. Fun pimps, please dont balance the game around people that cheese pois. I dont and if you balanced for that I'd be screwed and screwed for playing the pois as intended.

Not judging either. You wanna cheese you do you. I have been know to do it. But I dont come to the forums asking for nerfs based on that either.

 
Skimmed the thread. Fun pimps, please dont balance the game around people that cheese pois. I dont and if you balanced for that I'd be screwed and screwed for playing the pois as intended.
Not judging either. You wanna cheese you do you. I have been know to do it. But I dont come to the forums asking for nerfs based on that either.
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... Wrong thread? This has nothing to do with cheesing POIs, it's about the brass items the traders sell being a stupid purchase with the reimplementation of smelting duke tokens.

 
... Wrong thread? This has nothing to do with cheesing POIs, it's about the brass items the traders sell being a stupid purchase with the reimplementation of smelting duke tokens.
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It's a bit of both, or really 3 separate issues.

1. Dukes are worth far more then the brass items that you can buy with them

2. Quests are such an overbalanced way to get brass that it renders any other method to be almost pointless

3. Shared quests make this so exploitable allowing people to get 50k+ brass a day easily

For #1 they could always rebalance the cost of brass items

For #2 that's gonna be much harder, and take a lot more thought. Having more involved quests would go a long way into resolving this though

For #3 it could easily be fixed by making those you share a quest with get a lesser reward then the main quest holder

 
It's a bit of both, or really 3 separate issues.
1. Dukes are worth far more then the brass items that you can buy with them

2. Quests are such an overbalanced way to get brass that it renders any other method to be almost pointless

3. Shared quests make this so exploitable allowing people to get 50k+ brass a day easily

For #1 they could always rebalance the cost of brass items

For #2 that's gonna be much harder, and take a lot more thought. Having more involved quests would go a long way into resolving this though

For #3 it could easily be fixed by making those you share a quest with get a lesser reward then the main quest holder
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1. Easy fix. Or remove those pointless Brass items from trader stock.

2. Not everyone quests. Some people do not quest at all, so leave it. You cannot balance the game round the assumption that every group is efficiently questing every day and earning 50k dukes.

3. Same deal. Not everyone quests. Additionally some groups might go through 50k Brass a day. Shrug. Who are you to say 50k is too much? I know for a fact that an Insane level t5 clear quest at high gamestage will take us the whole day. So not only will we not earn anywhere near 50k dukes, but also we could easily use 10k casings in a single quest. Maybe more.

 
With their focus on getting people to actually bother with quests, they've made it "the best way to spend your time" .. with travel time and other logistics, it needs to be pretty heftily better than just straight up looting. If it's any good for a single player, and you multiply the quest portion by a group of any size, it's essentially unbalancable already. The only downside for the group is total travel time, but that also basically becomes a benefit when you can select several quests in one area.

Smelting dukes is just a major side-effect of that decision; that could somewhat be alleviated by removing the duke-smelt and stockpiling traders with masses of "properly priced" brass, whatever the proper price would be. But it would still leave the group multiplier untouched, and the overall economy balancing... well, I wouldn't give awards for the overall economy design in this iteration either, so .. there is no economy design, just "traders need to sell everything" and "we'll hack at it until it works"

 
See the game is designed and balanced around not using cheese. But cheese exist. The game is designed around the idea of going through a POI the proper way, not nerdpolling, not using horde night exploits and proper in design behavior by the player is unenforced...
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if that were the case, the rewards for clear and fetch/clear T5 quests wouldn't be specified to be better than T5 fetch.

The cheese will not always be there, thats what you gotta remember.
Do you see?
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sure it will. The AI already has gone through a VERY large number of iterations, with sweeping changes each time. In each case, players found ways to completely cheese the AI in a matter of minutes.
They won't be able to make a perfect AI. They won't be able to keep players from avoiding hordes if they want to. They won't be able to keep players from busting around obstacles since they've built a voxel game in a destructible world.

The cheese will continue to exist. It just might end up taking SLIGHTLY longer workarounds.

 
It is very hard to balance a game like this around the player base because there are so many different kinds of play styles. Also you have to take in to account whether someone is playing solo, in a small group, or in a group of 20+. You cheese POIs to get T5 quests cleared faster and with the most efficient way possible with a small group while someone else might take their time and clear it room by room solo. At times I've cheesed Blood Moon nights so that the zombies couldn't get to me. So should the game be balanced around that and made to where they can get to me no matter what I do? If the zombies haven't gotten to me in the first 30min of night then they all gain the ability to climb blocks or destroy blocks with one hit? That would fit my play style but would screw over anyone else that plays the game differently.

As for the trader selling brass, he also sells food for more expensive than you get get it from the machines. I see it as a tier system. If you can't find something you have to buy it. Maybe they need to just remove the ability to smelt dukes down in to brass. There is plenty of brass just laying around that it really isn't needed anymore in my opinion.

 
if that were the case, the rewards for clear and fetch/clear T5 quests wouldn't be specified to be better than T5 fetch.
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Actually you may be onto something. Fetch quest rewards (and Buried Supplies) quests should give considerably less reward than Clear-based quests, since you can do both those types with considerably less expenditure of both time and resources (ammo).

 
1. Easy fix. Or remove those pointless Brass items from trader stock.
2. Not everyone quests. Some people do not quest at all, so leave it. You cannot balance the game round the assumption that every group is efficiently questing every day and earning 50k dukes.

3. Same deal. Not everyone quests. Additionally some groups might go through 50k Brass a day. Shrug. Who are you to say 50k is too much? I know for a fact that an Insane level t5 clear quest at high gamestage will take us the whole day. So not only will we not earn anywhere near 50k dukes, but also we could easily use 10k casings in a single quest. Maybe more.
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Well the argument that not everyone does it doesn't actually solve the problem. If building leveled you 20x faster then any other activity people wouldn't say its fine because not everyone builds. They'd want it balanced with other activities.

Just because some people don't quest, doesn't mean it should be 20x better then any other way out there. All ways should be roughly equal, thus it doesn't matter if you choose to quest or not.

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It is very hard to balance a game like this around the player base because there are so many different kinds of play styles. Also you have to take in to account whether someone is playing solo, in a small group, or in a group of 20+. You cheese POIs to get T5 quests cleared faster and with the most efficient way possible with a small group while someone else might take their time and clear it room by room solo. At times I've cheesed Blood Moon nights so that the zombies couldn't get to me. So should the game be balanced around that and made to where they can get to me no matter what I do? If the zombies haven't gotten to me in the first 30min of night then they all gain the ability to climb blocks or destroy blocks with one hit? That would fit my play style but would screw over anyone else that plays the game differently.
As for the trader selling brass, he also sells food for more expensive than you get get it from the machines. I see it as a tier system. If you can't find something you have to buy it. Maybe they need to just remove the ability to smelt dukes down in to brass. There is plenty of brass just laying around that it really isn't needed anymore in my opinion.
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Not really. One very good change would be to how sharing quests works. It doesn't make sense that sharing a quest gives everyone the exact same reward as the quest owner.

Shared quests should give a totally different reward, less dukes, etc. The fact that a shared quest is the full reward is mostly what makes it incredibly OP in a group.

 
Actually you may be onto something. Fetch quest rewards (and Buried Supplies) quests should give considerably less reward than Clear-based quests, since you can do both those types with considerably less expenditure of both time and resources (ammo).
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I'd agree with that. They are definitely easier most of the time.

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Shared quests should give a totally different reward, less dukes, etc. The fact that a shared quest is the full reward is mostly what makes it incredibly OP in a group.
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I'd agree with also. ;-)

 
Fun pimps, please dont balance the game around people that cheese pois. I dont
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You wanna cheese you do you. I have been know to do it.
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I got a easy solution, just don't melt dukes down if you feel its broken? Like for example I will not use junk turrets outside of horde night UNLESS I am a int build with perks in turret syndrome.. why? because its brokenly overpowered and makes the game a joke, the knockdown is what makes junk turrets so good, its not their damage.

 
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